My first book is
out. It finally exists. I have to remind myself every morning that I
cannot keep working on it. It is time to
move on. So what’s next?
My next book is
tentatively entitled Slavery’s Leviathan:
Runaways, Fugitives, and the Slaveholders’ State, 1650-1865. As the title might suggest, it is chiefly about
the creation and practices of laws aimed at recovering runaway and fugitive
slaves in the American south from the colonial era through the Civil War. The project hinges on the basic fact that
from the mid-seventeenth-century through the American Civil War, the labor and
vigilance of elite slaveholders alone was far from sufficient to police and
keep intact the coercive foundations of the master-slave relationship. Rather, as enslaved persons asserted their
humanity in the acts of running away, achieving fugitive status, and demanding
freedom, slaveholders and their political allies understood that they required
the assistance of the white population in their communities—and in far-flung communities—to
preserve the legal status of slaves. Put
another way, to secure a political economy built upon the extraction of
African-American labor power, slaveholders would need to extract the labor
power of able-bodied free white men to prevent and police runaways and
fugitives. Slaves’ pursuit of humanity and freedom thus made slaveholders
constitute and dependent upon public power, and necessitated the construction
of a state capable of demanding and securing the labor power of white men.
So a baseline
assumption for me is that the construction of this state was necessary because
of the actions of the enslaved. As they
contested the terms of their enslavement through any number of actions but
especially through taking flight, and as they crossed jurisdictional borders,
they triggered a series of crises. At
the simplest level they threatened to disrupt some part of the labor process
and its organization. By taking flight,
they also posed a living challenge to the very legal conditions of their enslavement. For planters and their allies, the runaway
slave also invoked the specter of an armed insurrection—a specter that burned
ever brighter after the events, real and imagined, of the Haitian Revolution,
as several scholars have established (most recently by Alec Dun in his
outstanding Dangerous Neighbors: Makingthe Haitian Revolution in Early America).
None of this is my discovery, of course.
Most all of these dimensions of the material, historical, and moral
problem of the runaway slave have been discussed masterfully by legions of
scholars, especially John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger in Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation,
and Rebecca Scott and Jean Hebrard in FreedomPapers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation.
Because of the
enormity and strength of the literature on the enslaved and their journeys
through space and time, my book will be less about the enslaved and more about
the enslavers. We’ve come a long way
from the times when slaveowners were understood to be inherently opposed to the
use of state power simply because they opposed the federal government’s
regulatory power. I read Walter
Johnson’s monumental River of DarkDreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, for instance, to be about
how plantation owners in the Mississippi Valley forged a public power that was
suitable to the scope of their enterprises.
Put another way, it required an enormous release of capital and energy
to spatially remake an entire region into a “carceral landscape.” Likewise, Sally Hadden’s excellent book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas illustrates the limits and possibilities of slaveowners’
public powers in deploying groups of white men for the specific legal purpose
of apprehending runaway and fugitive slaves.
Jordan Grant, an American University doctoral student in history, is now hard at work on a remarkable dissertation that explains the emergence of the “slave catcher” in
nineteenth-century America.
All of the
layers of governance of that became required the assistance of the white
populations that lived adjacent to or nearby plantations or urban areas with
large slave populations. Going back to
the seventeenth century, statutes aiming to curb runaway slaves tried to
provide incentives for white residents of slave societies to assist in
preventing, apprehending, and renditioning runaway slaves. Consider for instance how Maryland’s 1676
“Act Relateing [sic] to Servants and Slaves” aiming to police “Serants
Runawayes” offered tobacco to locals and those in other colonies to “take upp
such servants or Runnawayes.” Consider,
too, the Fugitive Slave Clause of the United States Constitution: “If any
Person bound to service or labor in any of the United States shall escape into
another State, He or She shall not be discharged from such service or labor but
shall be delivered up to the person justly claiming their service or
labor.” In no less than the
Constitution, then, the phrase “shall be delivered up to the person justly
claiming their service or labor” suggests the intervention of people other than
the solicitous slaveowner. In the early
republic, southern states would enact numerous laws and that continued to grant
awards of cash or commodities to whites that assisted in giving life to
anti-runaway legislation while also criminalizing the acts of aiding or
abetting runaways.
I believe that
the legal institution at the heart of this project is known as the posse comitatus, or the “power of the
county,” which dated back to early modern English common law, and which
referred to the uncompensated, obligatory requirement that able-bodied males
serve as deputies to constables or other officers when called upon to
serve. As I have argued in an early
exploration of this project some years ago, the posse comitatus migrated to North America in the
seventeenth-century and became an important part of the framework of law
enforcement in the American colonies and states through legislation that sought
to prevent riots. But a key aspect of
the posse comitatus was that it was
compulsory. At least as a legal concept,
a white, able-bodied male could not say no to the demands of the law. This was why it proved so important as a
foundation for the legal regime that slaveholders built to police runaways: it
was always there and required obedience at all times. Indeed, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 invoked the specific language of the posse comitatus as the south pushed this vision of citizenship upon the nation.
Since I recently
completed National Duties, I am only
just beginning to dive in to the research and writing of this book. Right now I envision that it will span the
eighteenth century through the Civil War.
I am planning chapters that deal with the posse comitatus in the law of slavery, the forging of moral
obedience as a key aspect of white southern citizenship, and studies of the posse in practice: in the Kentucky-Ohio
borderlands, in ports active in the slave trade, in northern states and abroad,
and during the Civil War. I am extremely
fortunate that legal historians and others have written so much outstanding
scholarship on topics that touch on the issues that constitute the spine of
this project. Indeed the field has
changed so drastically since I began thinking about these issues in graduate
school that I am still trying to cobble together a working bibliography that
does justice to these growing historiographies.
As I continue to work on the project, I hope to check back in with you
through the LHB and other venues to let you know where my ideas and research
have gone.
In the meantime,
I want to give a heartfelt thanks to the editors of the LHB—Dan Ernst, Mitra
Sharafi, and Karen Tani—for inviting me to share my work with you. I also want to thank the incredible readers
of the blog who have been so generous with their time in reading and responding
to my posts. I’ve learned so much and
continue to be amazed at the amazing community of collegial and driven scholars
that surround the blog. So thanks again,
everyone!
